Comic Cuts - 22 January 2016

I've spent two days working full-pelt on the Harry Bensley story. Most of the time has been spent double-checking information and putting together a family tree for Bensley, as trying to follow the family background in text form might be a bit confusing for readers—best, I thought, to have a visual back-up for them to refer to, just in case.

The simplicity of the tree disguises the hours of torment I went through trying to discover how many kids some of these people had and what are known as "vital" records—dates of birth, death and marriage. Census records were a great help in establishing roughly when people were born (although you quickly discover that a lot of people told some pretty big fibs about their age); what census returns don't help much with is that second most vital piece of information: a date of death.

There are still one or two mysteries that I've not been able to resolve, but I think I now have everything I need to tell the story. To be honest, I'll be glad to get back to laying out the book. For something that was intended to be an e-book, I'm spending far too much time worrying about the design of the print edition!

I asked last week after a handful of books published by Wells Gardner Darton in around 1940/41 and was pleased to hear from Ward Saylor, who pointed me towards scans of all three. A couple were tiny, but one was slightly better than tiny, so I've done my best to clean it up... here they are:

 

This last is another cover by the mysterious S.C. who provided one of our covers last week.

Ace O'Hara continues all next week. And hopefully I'll have more news of Iron Mask... I'm determined to get the book out next month!